The mobile phone industry has been trying to implement mobile wallet functions into mobile phones for the last few years. The most well-known is the i-mode® mobile wallet of NTT DoCoMo implemented by a Sony Felica® contactless IC soldered onto the motherboard of NTT's 3G mobile phones. Other approaches include using Philips NFC (Near Field Communication) IC or Infra-Red port. All these approaches have suffered from high entry cost because a new phone must be obtained to acquire the mobile wallet functions. It is more cost effective to implement mobile wallet functions on a SIM card which cost much less than purchasing a new phone.
FIG. 1 shows an implementation of a NFC phone which is being adopted in France in 2007 to implement mobile wallet functions. A NFC chip 22 resides in a NFC phone 20 provided with a contactless interface attached with 13.5 Mhz RFID antenna 23. The NFC chip 22 provides two serial communication channels. One is to communicate with a SIM card 21 to retrieve authorization to enable the contactless interface and to work with mobile wallet applets that installed in the SIM card 21. The other is a standard asynchronous UART channel to a mobile phone CPU chip 24. This NFC chip 22 can not be built into the SIM card 21 because it requires many passive components and it has many more I/O pins than that are available on the SIM card 21 (there is actually only one I/O pin available). Mobile wallet users in France usually have to purchase a new NFC phone in order to acquire the mobile wallet function.
Recent solution for the mobile wallet functions in the industry have been devised by utilizing existing dual interface smart card IC chip provided with both contact and contactless ports, such as the Philips® Combi chips. These IC chips have two major problems. First, the Combi or dual interface IC chips are traditionally employed for banking cards specifying small non-volatile memory (typically EEPROM), while the SIM cards need a much larger memory capacity which are beginning to be built by state-of-art flash memory technology. Second, currently available dual interface IC chip can not have contact port (CM) and contactless port (CL) operating simultaneously. But this concurrent operation is required for a mobile wallet to work in SIM socket in mobile phones. Besides, the conventional Combi chips are limited to a low speed CPU and a small non-volatile memory because it has to operate under the low power limit imposed through the CL port. The above-mentioned problems are primary issues for a mobile wallet module to work within a SIM socket in mobile phones.
There have been a few patent applications regarding mobile wallet applications for payment or ticketing, such as U.S. Pat. No. 7,114,179 entitled “Method and system for ordering, loading and using access tickets” describes a ticket system wherein tickets are downloaded into SIM card memory module and a contactless interface in mobile phone is used to send ticket to access controlled device. U.S. Pub. No. 2002/0177407 as illustrated in FIG. 2 is a block diagram showing a configuration of a dual interface IC card for a portable telephone. This IC card 30 comprises a memory for storing information of electronic tickets or service points, a CPU (Central Processing Unit) for performing interface control with respect to the external and access control to the memory and the like. Furthermore, the IC card 30 is provided with an antenna 31, a contactless type I/F (interface) portion 32, a physical contact 33 and the like. The antenna 31 performs transmission/reception of data regarding use of an electronic ticket or the like with an external system, that is, a contactless reader (not shown) via a radio link R2 for IC card, namely RFID, and is intended to realize a contactless type interface. The contactless type I/F portion 32 provides an interface of data transmission/reception using the antenna 31. On the other hand, the contact 33 is electrically connected with a contact (not shown) of a portable telephone set 10, and intended to realize a contact type interface. In this way, the IC card 30 has both of the function as a contactless type IC card and the function as a contact type IC card. In other words, it is just like typical dual interface smart cards that are commonly in use these days. U.S. Pub. No. 2002/0177407 basically describes the idea of the placement of a dual interface IC card into a mobile phone. It failed to address any of the technical difficulties that must be solved to make a real world implementation.
As discussed above, the idea of SIM card added with contactless interface have been described many times, while most of the prior efforts are vague conceptual designs. None of them reveal practical real world implementation, let alone a mass produced solution that is achieved by the chipset in this invention. On account of the problem the prior art brought about, there is a resulting need for a chipset to cope with the above-mentioned problems. The present invention introduces an optimized chipset enabling immediate widespread usage by implementing the chipset having a wallet module in a SIM (Subscriber Identity Module) card that conforms to GSM11-11 form factor, including a 2G GSM SIM card, a 3G USIM (Universal SIM) card, a CDMA (Code Division Multiple Access) RUIM (Removable User Identity Module) card, a China PHS (Personal Handy-phone System) SIM card, or other mobile communication ID cards. Unlike the existing phone based solutions, the present chipset provides a simple, cost-effective solution, while is applicable to all kinds of mobile phones.